Radio Club and Student Radio Stations
The first meeting of the Smith College Radio Club was held on December 2, 1947. Marjorie Boselly was appointed by the President of the Student Council to conduct research on the possibility of starting a student-run radio station at Smith. Their goals were to provide Smith students with a radio program that related to their particular interests, to integrate curricular and extra-curricular activities on campus, and to give interested young women practical experience in the field of radio. After just over a year of research, lectures, training, and convincing, Boselly’s vision was realized as WCSR, the Smith College radio station. WCSR went on the air for the first time on January 6, 1949. Although the Radio Club was at first housed in a college-owned garage and was broadcast over the electric power line which followed the central heating system, it received tremendous support from the student body. It was not long before WCSR began to flourish. In the spring of 1950, WCSR joined Amherst College’s WAMF and the University of Massachusetts’ WMUA in the Pioneer Broadcasting System. By doing so WCSR participated in larger-scale broadcasts and combined the talents and interests of students from all three schools.
Throughout its years of existence, WCSR aired many different types of programs ranging from evenings of classical music to disc-jockey shows to dramas to interviews to campus debates and always played special shows on holidays. Club members had high hopes for the future of Smith College radio. Their plans for improvement were put on hold indefinitely when the building in which WCSR was housed had to be torn down in 1956. These ideas and plans were not revived until twenty-one years later, when in 1977 WRSC, a new Smith College radio station, was created in an attempt to ease communication problems that had arisen on campus. As college radio stations in general began to flourish during the early 1980’s, the Smith College radio station went FM in 1982 as WOZQ, playing twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The staff of WOZQ describes itself as “student run and estrogen powered” and prides itself in playing music to suit an array of different tastes and hosting shows at various locations throughout the Pioneer Valley.
For further information please see: http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/smitharchives/manosca94.html
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